Documents Bordo, Michael 5 results

"This paper examines three areas in which analogies have been made between the interwar depression and the financial crisis of 2007 which reached a dramatic climax in September 2008 with the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the rescue of AIG: they can be labeled macro-economic, micro-economic, and geo-political. First, the paper considers the story of monetary policy failures; second, there follows an examination of the micro-economic issues concerned with bank regulation and the reorganization of banking following the failure of one or more major financial institutions and the threat of systemic collapse; third, the paper turns to the issue of global imbalances and asks whether there are parallels that might be found in this domain too between the 1930s and the events of today."

"In this paper we discuss the lessons learned from the US banking panics in the 1930s for the response by the Federal Reserve to the crisis of 2008. We revisit the debate over illiquidity versus insolvency in the banking crises of the 1930s and provide empirical evidence that the banking crises largely reflected illiquidity shocks. In the recent crisis the Fed under Bernanke had well learned the lesson from the banking panics of the 1930s of conducting expansionary monetary policy to meet demands for liquidity. However, unlike in the 1930s, the deeper problem of the recent crisis was not illiquidity but insolvency and especially the fear of insolvency of counterparties. A number of virtually insolvent US banks deemed too big and too interconnected to fail were rescued by fiscal bail-outs. "

"This paper compares the recent global crisis and recession to earlier international financial crises and recessions. Based on existing
chronologies of banking, currency and debt crises we identify clusters of crises. We use an identification of extreme events and a weighting scheme based on real GDP relative to the U.S. to identify global financial crises since 1880. For banking crises we identify five global ones since 1880: 1890-91, 1907-08, 1913-14, 1931-32, 2007-2008.

In terms of global incidence the recent crisis is fourth in ranking and comparable to 1907-08. We also calculate output losses during the recessions associated with global financial crises and again the recent crisis is similar in severity to 1907-08 and is fourth in ranking. On both dimensions the recent crisis is a pale shadow of the Great depression. The relatively mild experience of the recent crisis may reflect institutional and policy learning."

"In this paper, we review and attempt to explain the changes in business cycle synchronization among 16 industrial countries and the over the past century and a quarter, demarcated into four exchange rate regimes. We find that there is a secular trend towards increased synchronization for much of the twentieth century and that it occurs across diverse exchange rate regimes. This finding is in marked contrast to much of the recent literature, which has focused primarily on the evidence for the past 20 or 30 years and which has produced mixed results. We then examine the role of global shocks and shock transmission in the trend toward synchronization. Our key finding here is that global (common) shocks generally are the dominant influence. "